Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Online Free
Author: Bram Stoker
Tags: Fiction, Classics
logarithms that is used as a missile against it, yet baulks at the Bible – a symbolic triumph of faith over logic. There indeed turn out to be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Malcolmson’s philosophy, the cultured and reasoned scientific defences of his mathematical library proving useless against the uncanny forces which threaten the fundamentals of reason itself.
In deference to the Gothic tradition, Malcolmson’s attempt to shore up the fragments of logic against rationality’s ruination is strongly reminiscent of the third chapter of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1848), where Lockwood piles a pyramid of books in front of his window in order to prevent Catherine Linton’s apparition from entering the room. Himself a town-dweller and therefore a stranger to the elemental effects of the wilderness, Lockwood cannot – and will not – comprehend an explanation for his ‘dream’ as anything other than the ‘effects of bad tea and bad temper’. 20 In like manner, the ideological deconstruction of rigid confines between good and evil that takes place in ‘The Judge’s House’ (a supposedly righteous judge is in fact an envoy of evil) connects the story with the Gothic genre’s long-established subversion of ‘conventional’ powers of right and wrong, for instance in William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
(1794) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818; 1831).
The last two stories in
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
have a rather different tone to the rest of the collection.The pietism of the Christian morality tale ‘A Dream of Red Hands’ (1894) and the acerbic ridiculing of Celtic sentimentality in ‘Crooken Sands’ (1894) initially seem at odds with the other, dourer, Gothic tales. However, the stories’ concerns about Jacob Settle’s immortal soul or the comic lingering over the absurdity of Arthur Markam’s tartan costume do not irrevocably set them apart. Prophecy, nightmares and the recurrent Gothic motif of the doppelgänger soon offset the reverence and humour with darker revelations about the ability of the mind to react forcibly to the power of suggestion. Furthermore, whilst absolution certainly marks the apogee of each – Settle’s hands are wiped clean and Markam learns the ‘fatal force’ of his vanity – as with the other stories, resolution and satisfaction remain at variance. For Settle to conquer eternal damnation, he must paradoxically give up his life. Markam, meanwhile, learns ‘what a vain old fool I was’ at the expense of the drowned haberdasher Mr Roderick MacDhu who, it is ultimately revealed, is the apparition that has haunted the London merchant. Contradiction once more dominates the tales of this most enigmatic of writers.
‘So much for the fortified heights; but the hollows
too have their own story’: History, Myth and Stoker’s
Evil Women
This notion of contradiction is especially pertinent to
The Lair of the White Worm
, originally published by William Rider and Son Ltd in 1911. Often dismissed as the confused ramblings of a dying man, the novel’s critical place as the culmination of Stoker’s output has been unfairly overshadowed by the assumption that its conception and construction was undertaken in a haze of opium and syphilis. 21 A bizarre novel, certainly, which seems defined more by its collection of inconsistent subplots than by any coherent driving narrative,
The Lair of the White Worm
has languished in obscurity, heavily abridged, since its initial publication. Indeed, subsequent editions were significantly edited or amended in an attempt to extract a degree of coherence from its pages.
Although this story was written between 3 March and 12 June 1911, its hasty composition belies a text that embodies all the concerns and contradictions of Stoker’s work. In thrall to the abiding power of myth and legend, yet also attuned to contemporary scientific ideas, the novel crosses borders between the logical and the
In deference to the Gothic tradition, Malcolmson’s attempt to shore up the fragments of logic against rationality’s ruination is strongly reminiscent of the third chapter of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1848), where Lockwood piles a pyramid of books in front of his window in order to prevent Catherine Linton’s apparition from entering the room. Himself a town-dweller and therefore a stranger to the elemental effects of the wilderness, Lockwood cannot – and will not – comprehend an explanation for his ‘dream’ as anything other than the ‘effects of bad tea and bad temper’. 20 In like manner, the ideological deconstruction of rigid confines between good and evil that takes place in ‘The Judge’s House’ (a supposedly righteous judge is in fact an envoy of evil) connects the story with the Gothic genre’s long-established subversion of ‘conventional’ powers of right and wrong, for instance in William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
(1794) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818; 1831).
The last two stories in
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
have a rather different tone to the rest of the collection.The pietism of the Christian morality tale ‘A Dream of Red Hands’ (1894) and the acerbic ridiculing of Celtic sentimentality in ‘Crooken Sands’ (1894) initially seem at odds with the other, dourer, Gothic tales. However, the stories’ concerns about Jacob Settle’s immortal soul or the comic lingering over the absurdity of Arthur Markam’s tartan costume do not irrevocably set them apart. Prophecy, nightmares and the recurrent Gothic motif of the doppelgänger soon offset the reverence and humour with darker revelations about the ability of the mind to react forcibly to the power of suggestion. Furthermore, whilst absolution certainly marks the apogee of each – Settle’s hands are wiped clean and Markam learns the ‘fatal force’ of his vanity – as with the other stories, resolution and satisfaction remain at variance. For Settle to conquer eternal damnation, he must paradoxically give up his life. Markam, meanwhile, learns ‘what a vain old fool I was’ at the expense of the drowned haberdasher Mr Roderick MacDhu who, it is ultimately revealed, is the apparition that has haunted the London merchant. Contradiction once more dominates the tales of this most enigmatic of writers.
‘So much for the fortified heights; but the hollows
too have their own story’: History, Myth and Stoker’s
Evil Women
This notion of contradiction is especially pertinent to
The Lair of the White Worm
, originally published by William Rider and Son Ltd in 1911. Often dismissed as the confused ramblings of a dying man, the novel’s critical place as the culmination of Stoker’s output has been unfairly overshadowed by the assumption that its conception and construction was undertaken in a haze of opium and syphilis. 21 A bizarre novel, certainly, which seems defined more by its collection of inconsistent subplots than by any coherent driving narrative,
The Lair of the White Worm
has languished in obscurity, heavily abridged, since its initial publication. Indeed, subsequent editions were significantly edited or amended in an attempt to extract a degree of coherence from its pages.
Although this story was written between 3 March and 12 June 1911, its hasty composition belies a text that embodies all the concerns and contradictions of Stoker’s work. In thrall to the abiding power of myth and legend, yet also attuned to contemporary scientific ideas, the novel crosses borders between the logical and the
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